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Asteroid creeps up on the inside

By Jeff Hecht and David L. Chandler

ASTRONOMERS have discovered an asteroid with an orbit that lies entirely inside Earth’s – the first of its kind. Asteroid 2003 CP20 strays no further than 146.3 million kilometres from the Sun, while the closest Earth ever gets is 147.1 million kilometres.

The new object, called 2003 CP20, is a few kilometres across. But it poses no threat to Earth – its orbit is tilted 29 degrees from ours, so it will never come any closer than 28 million kilometres. Brian Marsden of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who reported sightings of the …